Nancy Spero

"For five years, from 1966-1970, I painted The War Series: Bombs and Helicopters. These works were intended as manifestos against our incursion into Vietnam, a personal attempt at exorcism. The bombs are phallic and nasty, exaggerated sexual representations of the penis: heads with tongues sticking out, violent depictions of the human (mostly male) body. The clouds of the bomb are filled with screaming heads vomiting poison onto the victims below, etc."Nancy Spero, excerpted from The War Series 1966-1970, Charta.

American figurative artist, feminist and political activist Nancy Spero was born in 1926 in Cleveland. Solo exhibitions of her work were mounted regularly around the world from 1951 until the time of her death, at age 83, in 2009. Key solo exhibitions of her work were held at The Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1992 and the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles in 1988; a major traveling retrospective originated at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, NY in 1987. Spero's work was included in Documenta X in Kassel, Germany. She often showed her work in two-person exhibitions with her husband, the respected painter and political activist Leon Golub, who died in 2004. In 2010, A Spero retrospective is planned for the Pompidou Center in Paris.

Published by Charta.Text by Cristiana Perrella, Achille Bonito Oliva. Interview by Alessandra Mammí.

After studying at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Fine Arts Academy of Paris, Nancy Spero distinguished herself as one of the most significant protagonists on the New York art scene, where she has lived and worked since 1964. Among the most prominent and influential figures in American art today, she has always been involved in feminist and peace movements, and has elaborated a language of painting that is intimately tied to social and anthropological realities. This volume focuses on the artist's social commitments, as documented in photographs and an interview, and also includes recent works recording her path through art and politics. Thanks to important solo shows in public museums and at important venues such as the 2007 Venice Biennale curated by Robert Storr, which featured her work "Maypole: Take No Prisoners," and solo exhibitions in Spain, over the past few years Spero has conquered the European art scene. Nancy Spero is an American-Jewish artist who works in many media, both traditional and experimental. Spero was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1926. After attending the University of Colorado at Boulder from 1944-1945, she received her BA from the Art Institute of Chicago in 1949. Her first solo exhibit was in Paris in 1962.

PUBLISHERCHARTA

BOOK FORMATPaperback, 6.75 x 9.5 in. / 64 pgs / 16 color / 30 bw.

PUBLISHING STATUSPUB DATE 9/30/2009Out of print

DISTRIBUTIOND.A.P. EXCLUSIVECATALOG: FALL 2009 p. 84

PRODUCT DETAILSISBN 9788881587445TRADELIST PRICE: $24.95 CDN $27.50

AVAILABILITYNot Available

STATUS: Out of print | 00/00/00

For assistance locating a copy, please see our list of recommended out of print specialists >

Vol.11

Published by Walther König, Köln.

For more than half a century, the influential American artist and activist Nancy Spero has been known for her relentless honesty and her unshakable commitment to political, social and cultural causes--from women’s issues to war and other power conflicts. In this volume, she shares strong thoughts and light moments with series editor Hans Ulrist Obrist.

Published by Charta.Essays by Leon Golub and Robert Storr.

Galvanized by the political events of the Vietnam War, Nancy Spero dedicated herself for five years to creating a group of gouache paintings on paper, titled The War Series. In these works, Spero not only expressed her rage at the violence and oppression of the war, but also introduced many of the images and themes that would continue to find their place in her work, and anticipated the post-modern aesthetic of fracture, dissonance, and collage. This volume is the first to analyze The War Series in depth, and its publication could not, unfortunately, be more timely.

PUBLISHERCHARTA

BOOK FORMATHardcover, 8.25 x 10.5 in. / 64 pgs / 34 color / 9 bw.

PUBLISHING STATUSPUB DATE 2/2/2004Out of print

DISTRIBUTIOND.A.P. EXCLUSIVECATALOG: SPRING 2004

PRODUCT DETAILSISBN 9788881584574TRADELIST PRICE: $30.00 CDN $35.00

AVAILABILITYNot Available

STATUS: Out of print | 00/00/00

For assistance locating a copy, please see our list of recommended out of print specialists >

As early as the 1960s, Nancy Spero's work was breaking ranks with the establishment. Her unique pictorial vocabulary and insistent political engagement was a far cry--and a loud cry--from the styles of abstraction that dominated the American art world at that time. She articulated and has continued to drive at themes of burning interest to her: protest against the Vietnam War, the alienation of society and violence against women, for example against Jewish woman under National Socialism and in the historical contexts of witch hunts. A Continuous Present pairs her War Series (1966-70), a cycle of anti-Vietnam War gouaches, with an overview of her work from the last decade. Between 1992 and 2001, Spero created infinite-seeming works on long horizontal and vertical bands of paper--a format borrowed from Egyptian papyrus rolls, Chinese scroll painting and antique friezes--populating them with female figures taken from mythology, various epochs and diverse cultures, giving them feminist momentum via highly charged or parodistic confrontations.